The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 18

  On the whole, Trennus would rather face a mad godling than have the two of them argue about anything.

  Chapter 3: Boundaries

  Boundaries are common in folklore, and form the basis of a good deal of early thought on magic. Dividing lines are a comfort to the human mind, as are certainties. Inside of this town’s defensive wall, or pale, we know who we are. We’re kin. We’re alike. Anyone outside of that wall, is other. Different. They might be touched by strange spirits, or they might be monsters. They’re not to be trusted. And the young soldiers or sorcerers who leave the protection of the walls, and go out into the darkness? When they return, they’ve been ‘beyond the pale.’ They come back different. They’ve given up some essential part of themselves, so that others could remain at home, safe. They’ve changed. They’re still us, but also, not quite us. Maybe some of the darkness, the danger, the other, the magic, came back, inside of them. And that inspires fear, awe, and mistrust in those villagers who stayed behind, by the safety of the hearth.

  Other common boundaries, beyond walls and fences? Streams. It’s a common misconception that a malefic spirit cannot cross running water. This comes from the near-universal notion that water, and fresh, running water in particular, purifies. A fire elemental will certainly hesitate before crossing a stream, but most of them are intelligent enough to find a bridge, or to possess a mortal body, or fly over the water. They won’t be brooked by a brook.

  Some of the very oldest magic, sympathetic rituals intended to purify the human body, involved full-body immersion. This kind of ritualized magic can have a minor effect, and the rituals were created in an effort to replicate the birth-waters and to signify a rebirth of the person. These symbolic births were intended to throw off a spirit searching for someone’s life-essence, on the partially substantiated theory that a spirit can look for the ‘life-string’ of a person—where it begins and ends in time and space. (Which is why many practitioners of magic conceal the date and time of their birth.) These rituals were also intended to bind worshippers more firmly to a god through ceremony and belief. Of course, we now know that many spirits hunt by DNA, so masking efforts have turned towards replicating another person’s identity in this fashion.

  But I digress. A running stream has been thought of as a boundary, but is little protection. A large quantity of salt-water is a greater help, but will not stop a god of sufficient power from finding his or her prey. Crossroads were thought of as both boundaries, and intersections between realms. Hecate was propitiated at crossroads . . . for she was and is the lady of doors, the one who opens the way to other realms, or at least, the Veil.

  But what of other boundaries? Within your own mind? What lines are there, that you would not choose to cross? And what power, and what losses must be endured for that power, come about, when you cross an unthinkable line? I am not advocating the unethical use of power, mind you. There are people out there who would, even now, suggest making human sacrifices to the gods. That is not at all what I mean with this discussion. But what I do mean to say is this: power has a price. Know what that price is before you reach for it. And if you choose to take it, and use it, then pay the price without complaint.

  —Erida Lelayn, “Ethics and the Modern Magi: Crisis Points.” Summoning, Sorcery, and Ley-magic: A First-Year Primer, p. 45. University of Jerusalem Press, 1993 AC.

  ______________________

  Maius 4, 1992 AC

  There were two chains of islands north of Britannia, proper: the Haemodae islands, colonized centuries before by a tribe of Picts known as the tribe of the Cat, or the Cait, and the Orcades islands, named for the tribe of the Boar. Both were subject to the king of the Picts, currently white-haired Vindiorix, who ruled out of Tarvodubron, or Bullwater, on the northern coast. The actual petty kingdom of Caledonia reached as far south as Loch Lomond, while other small kingdoms picked up again, further to the south. The Romans had always called the people of the far north the Picts, or the painted ones. But Pytheas of Massalia, the first Hellene explorer to have traveled to Britannia and the Arctic Circle some three hundred years before Caesar lived, reported that the people of the island called themselves the “people of forms” or the “people of marks,” for the marks on their skin. The Prydein.

  The name had been corrupted to Britain, and Britannia, by the Romans. The Prydein had all been a set of interrelated tribes of Celto-Gauls, back in the day, and today, Britannians still were. Some were more Romanized than others, of course. And those in the Haemodae and Orcades considered themselves, proudly, the least Romanized Gauls in all of Europa. Even the king of the Picts was, in their mind, soft and Roman. He had a Roman mother, after all. They were dour, clannish fisher-folk, in the main, who wanted little to do with the mainland, and rather thought that the recent rise in ocean levels, which had put half of their villages underwater, forcing them to rebuild on higher ground, must be Rome’s fault. Somehow.

  To the distant northeast of them, there were no inhabitants left on Svalbard island. The Goths there had once been supplied by boat from Gotaland, but they’d lost most of their support when Gotaland, Cimbri, and all the other petty kingdoms had collapsed. Over the years, the population had dwindled, and now, Svalbard had been left to the polar bears . . . and the lindworms that had flown over from the mainland. They didn’t harass the Haemodae or Orcades, yet, but they periodically attacked fishing boats that went after the same schools of fish as they did, themselves. And to the northwest, the population of the Faroe islands had never exceeded thirty people even before these troubled times. And now the area was abandoned, too, as the waters rose, and supply lines failed.

  So it was a fishing boat that had set out from Haemodae in the early morning hours that raised the first alarm. The waves around the tiny, old-fashioned vessel, on which the men still raised and lowered the nets by hand, were growing alarmingly large. The North Sea was usually unforgiving, and they were used to ten-foot waves. But at the moment, though the sky overhead was blue and clear . . . they were being slammed by twenty-footers. “Turn it around,” the captain ordered. There was no sense in risking lives when the weather was clearly unnatural.

  And that was when a thirty-footer rose up, a true rogue wave, and slammed the side of the small ship. Men shouted and clung to anything—spars, nets, rails—as the ship threatened to capsize. Two were washed overboard, and as the ship righted itself, all hands moved, immediately, to rescue them. And then every man aboard stopped in mid-motion. Looked up, as a black, steaming creature rose up out of the sea. Lines of red light cracked along the undersides of scales, and two eyes, each half the size of their boat, stared down at them with a volcanic glow. Steam poured away from the creature’s sides, and all around its body, the water boiled, and the men out in it screamed in agony as they were scalded from head to toe.

  Then the creature hissed, a sound that sizzled against their skins, surging past them, almost swamping the boat again . . . and something else passed by, overhead. Something that screamed in their minds. One of the hardened old sailors looked up at the right moment, and swore he saw something flying, high above, that the serpent seemed to be pursuing. Something that was both there, and not there, at the same time. Something that pulled light in around it.

  And then the serpent swarmed off, careless of the men and the tiny boat. And whatever it was chasing, moved off as well. They were . . . insignificant. Ants beneath the feet of titans. And they got back to work, futilely trying to rescue those swept overboard, and the captain got on the radio, calling back to Haemodae and the Orcades, trying not to sound hysterical or foolish as he told them that there was a monster several miles tall heading straight for the northern islands.

  That had been 4:14 antemeridian, local time, and about twenty miles off the shore of the northernmost island of Unst. The fishing trawler could make, at its best speed, eight knots; the giant serpent was moving at three times that speed, easily. A half-hour later, the few residents of the northernmost island who weren’t already awake a
nd working tumbled out of their beds as a massive earthquake—something almost unheard of in the region—shook Unst. Residents, mostly women and children, poured out of their low cottages and stared up into the sky as something crackled there . . . and then people began falling over, dead. A little girl screamed as her mother fell to the ground, and shook her shoulder, over and over, begging her to get up. Energy sizzled through the air, and the mother’s face lifted. Stared blankly at the girl. And reached for the child’s throat. Her crippled grandfather hobbled over and pulled the choking girl out of his own daughter’s grip. “What ails you?” he demanded, only to have his daughter leap up, supple as an eel, and latch onto him now, biting and clawing.

  The people who hadn’t died, hadn’t turned to ghul, and who didn’t have any ghul attacking them, were largely located on the western side of the island, and it was they who saw the reason why the earth once more began to tremble, as a massive serpent made of magma pulled itself out of the suddenly steaming ocean. It slithered, rapidly, along the ground, heedless of what lay in its path. Trees and houses were crushed beneath it, and it left a line of fire and melted rock in its path. People and animals ran, helplessly, bolting for the slim protection of the North Sea, and stood in the surf heated to the temperature of fresh blood as it dashed itself on the rocky shore. They gaped as the creature lunged skywards, its enormous jaws snapping at something unseen. “Where are the gods?” someone shouted, hysterically. “Call to them! Call to Toutatis the protector, the crafter, Taranis the thunderer, Nodens of the sea, and to the Morrigan! Call to Cernunnos! They must come! They must help us!”

  The waves bit and tore at them with teeth of ice and grains of sand, and they prayed . . . but at first, no one answered. They were only a handful of people, at the northern edge of nowhere, after all.

  Jormangand rolled over the small island, leaving a line of melted slag in his wake as he pursued his foe. The mad god, unseen by the humans below, dodged and wove. Tried to rise up higher in the air to loop around and come down behind the god-beast. Siphoned away at his energies, tearing at his sides, and then darted away again as the great maw closed near its core body. The two were only picking up speed.

  Two hours later, the world-serpent rolled over the northern Orcades islands. Most of these land masses were longer than they were wide, and some were no more than a mile in width at any point. Some of the villagers had gotten the alert from the Haemodae, and had put to sea in their boats, trusting in their skill, in spite of the dangerous waves, rather than risk staying on land. Entire villages were wiped out, between the continuous vibration, generated by what seemed as if an enormous glacier had somehow achieved ramming speed, and the fact that the world-serpent simply crushed anything in its path.

  On the main island, the sitting king of Caledonia, Vindiorix Matrugena, began evacuating as many of his people as he could, but highways and roads were quickly jammed with motorcars and buses. Some people simply didn’t take the evacuation orders seriously; they all knew of the threat of mad god attacks. But it couldn’t happen here. Not where the gods of the Gauls were strong, now could it?

  At 7:45 antemeridian, the mad god partially manifested over the northern shores of Britannia, about five miles east of Tarvodubron. And Jormangand followed it up onto the shores of Caledonia, roaring in fury and lashing out with all of his strength. A temple to Nodens, lord of the sea, was crushed beneath him, and fire ran out through the entire small town of Stanerill as the serpent pulled himself out of the sea and coiled on the shore. Each loop of his massive body begat another, wider pool of lava around him. People fled, jumping into motorcars trying to make for Tarvodubron to the west, but the roads were already packed with evacuees. Many ran, on foot, into the Caledonian Forest, as their ancestors had so often taken shelter under its branches. And they called out to the spirit of the Forest to protect them.

  Lightning split the sky as Taranis and Nodens manifested, only to find an enraged Jormangand and a mad god waiting for them. And, at the same moment, Saraid heard the desperate pleading of thousands of her first people, begging her to protect them. It was 9:45 antemeridian in Jerusalem, and Trennus had taken a rare dies Veneris off from work with the counter-summoning team. His eyes had snapped open at Saraid’s call, and he’d thrown himself out of bed almost without thinking. No matter how many years he’d spent in Judea, Britannia—Caledonia—was always home in his mind. The house on Shar’abi Street was where his children had grown up, though he’d been careful to take as many of them to Britannia for the summers as he could. But Caledonia was where his heart had stayed. In the chill of the north, the rugged green hills, and the vast Caledonian Forest. That was probably why his piece of the Veil echoed it so.

  Saraid pulled him through the Veil, and they ran together, following a trail only she could sniff out, and then they emerged into the mortal realm again, with Trennus having barely noticed the transition for once. They emerged into a forest whose smell was in his psyche, and that he could never perfectly replicate in the Veil, no matter how hard he tried. These rocks, this soil, these trees. A hint of smoke in the air.

  “How close are we to Tarvodubron?” Trennus demanded, urgently. The port city was where his father had moved the overall seat of government decades ago, on the grounds that the large and bustling port could sustain the expenses of all the elected officials better than the previous seat at Dhu Rinn. Trennus had preferred Dhu Rinn, all told. It was where he’d grown up, where he’d been apprenticed to Senecita, and where he’d hunted and roamed the woods. It was still coastal, but the area was more rugged, and more sparsely populated. There had been more chances to get out and run in the woods and the hills.

  About two miles southwest. We’re not far from Loch Calder. The icy lake, surrounded as it was, by pines and oaks, had been a favorite haunt of Trennus and his brothers when they’d visited Tarvodubron. Look!

  Trennus followed Saraid’s finger as she flowed into her humanoid form, and peered through the dense overhead branches at the gray sky, as lightning flashed across the heavens. And in the wake of the blue-white bolt, a black, seething tendril arced out, chasing the lightning across the sky. Then another. Then another. Oh gods. It’s a big one. This isn’t one of the little ones we were chasing up in the Arctic. This one hasn’t been split by Jormangand’s jaws.

  With a start, he suddenly realized that he and Saraid were here . . . pretty much alone. Lassair’s soul-bond still pulsed in him, of course, but he hadn’t stopped to get backup. Of course, Kanmi’s dead. Minori’s got a piece of Amaterasu in her now, and as such, I’m not sure she could have come here . . . and even if the gods of the north have an alliance with my people’s gods, Sigrun’s fighting in Germania . . . and Adam’s too old to help. Damn it, he’s a year younger than I am.

  Trennus began to run through the woods, a steady, mile-eating pace that he remembered from decades of hunting deer here for Saraid. Vaulting over a fallen tree. Skidding down a low hill, feet light on the rounded, slick rocks of a little stream, Saraid shifting back into her wolf form and loping off ahead of him . . . and then they broke out of the tree line, and Trennus got his first look at the battlefield.

  Jormangand towered up, bigger than any skyscraper ever built, as tall as a mountain and just as unmistakable. Rising up like one of the space elevators Adam periodically went on about. In the sky above him, as the serpent dipped, swayed, and struck, Trennus could see the malevolent black tendrils of a mad god—one that blotted out almost a third of the sky with its long arms. The central sphere was swollen, three or four times the size of the sun’s disc, and it pulsed as it drove a tendril down into Jormangand’s body, while three dozen others stabbed down into the earth. Aloft, Trennus beheld something he’d never expected to see with his own eyes: the gods of his own people, fighting in the firmament. His heart suddenly ached with awe at the sight of Taranis the thunderer and Nodens of the sea, each trying to catch and tear away the tendrils, risking being impaled by them, themselves. And then Jormangand, enrage
d and roaring, the earth shaking under his weight, snapped at Nodens, and not the mad godling.

  What is he doing? Saraid demanded, horrified.

  “I think he currently sees everything around him as a threat,” Trennus assessed, numbly, as he saw one of his own gods jerk out of the way of that lethal set of jaws. “He wouldn’t agree to an alliance, months ago. It’s going to take Loki to put a leash on that damned creature.” If anyone can. He brought his eyes down, and spotted the streams of people on the roads. Sunlight reflecting off of motorcars, in the distance. Some people running here. Some running into the Forest . . . which was already in flames, in places. Spot-fires, started from Jormangand’s breath, perhaps.